“Wow! Congratulations to Greg Gutfeld, a one time Trump Hater who has come all the way home,” Trump wrote amid a series of inflammatory social media posts that attacked, among others, the “Fake News Lamestream Media” and “Do Nothing Democrats.” “His Ratings easily beat no talent Stephen Colbert, nice guy Jimmy Fallon, and wacko ‘last placer’ Jimmy Kimmel. Greg built his show from scratch, and did a great job in doing so.”

Kimmel was the first of the three late-night hosts to respond to Trump via Twitter, writing, “Happy Cinco de Mayo Mr. President! Thanks for the shout-out—now get back to work royally fucking everything up!”

The host also addressed Trump during his talk show on Tuesday night. “I think maybe this was another typo situation I think what he meant to tweet was, ‘I am completely devastated by the loss of life caused by this insidious virus,’” Kimmel said, referencing the global health crisis that has left more than 72,000 Americans dead. “My thoughts are with the families of those who have passed. I pledge to spend every waking moment working to make sure our medical workers have the support they need and every American has access to tests. PS–congrats to Greg Gutfeld!’”

As should be expected by now, Trump didn’t provide any context for his missive. But a story published by The Hill on May 2 might have been the impetus. “Fox’s Greg Gutfeld Show tops Colbert, Fallon, Kimmel in late-night ratings race,” reads the piece’s headline—an impressive achievement that’s also misleading. According to the Nielsen data presented in the story, Gutfeld’s Fox News show did finish the month of April with an average of 2.86 million viewers per episode, a number in a vacuum that is greater than Colbert’s The Late Show on CBS (2.78 million), Fallon’s The Tonight Show on NBC (2.09 million), and Kimmel’s eponymous talk show on ABC (2 million). But The Greg Gutfeld Show airs on weekly on Saturday nights at 10 p.m. ET, not each weeknight at 11:30 p.m. ET. As a result, Gutfeld doesn’t directly compete with the late-night hosts Trump decided to single out.

Trump has been ratings-focused throughout the global health crisis, boasting about the viewership numbers his coronavirus task force briefings have generated. “Because the ‘Ratings’ of my News Conferences etc. are so high, ‘Bachelor finale, Monday Night Football type numbers’ according to the
[New York Times], the Lamestream Media is going CRAZY. ‘Trump is reaching too many people, we must stop him.’ said one lunatic,” Trump wrote on March 29.

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“I’ve had great ‘ratings’ my whole life, there’s nothing unusual about that for me. The White House News Conference ratings are “through the ‘roof’ (Monday Night Football, Bachelor Finale, [New York Times]) but I don’t care about that. I care about going around the Fake News to the PEOPLE!” he added on April 21.

Trump was back on the ratings beat days later, after wondering out loud during a press briefing if injecting disinfectant into patients diagnosed with coronavirus could be a medical breakthrough. (It is not.) The backlash to those comments was so severe that Trump even briefly toyed with the notion of canceling the press briefings altogether. “What is the purpose of having White House News Conferences when the Lamestream Media asks nothing but hostile questions, & then refuses to report the truth or facts accurately. They get record ratings, & the American people get nothing but Fake News. Not worth the time & effort!” he tweeted on April 25.

Trump’s ire toward Colbert and Kimmel, however, is far from a surprise. (The president has normally avoided attacking Fallon, though he did come for the Tonight Show emcee after Fallon apologized for his now-infamous 2016 interview with then-candidate Trump.) The hosts routinely hammer Trump and those in his orbit for the government response to the coronavirus pandemic, which has left more than 1.2 million Americans infected with the disease. Last week, after Jared Kushner took a shot what he called “the eternal lockdown crowd” who “make jokes on late-night television,” Kimmel specifically addressed Trump’s son-in-law with a series of one-liners about his physical appearance and general vibe.

“Jared Kushner is so dead inside, the president calls him ‘Melania,’” Kimmel joked at the time. “Jared Kushner looks like if white privilege had a baby with raw cookie dough. Jared Kushner looks like a Pez dispenser of Young Sheldon. Even Jared from Subway is like, ‘this Jared gives me the creeps!’”

In fact, just before posting his tweet, the New York Post ran an interview with Trump where he blasted Colbert and Seth Meyers for their past appearances as hosts of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

“Seth Meyers, he was nasty. Just one joke. The guy’s got no talent whatsoever. Zero. How do these guys get jobs? I don’t get it. How does a Seth Meyers, how does Colbert—has no talent, there’s nothing funny about him, nothing funny. You look at some of these people and you say, ‘How do they get a job?’ They are just so average. They are average people, they are average people,” Trump said.

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Responding to those remarks on his show Tuesday evening, Colbert joked, “I can’t speak for Seth. He’s very talented. But I am an idiot. The only reason I have this job is because I married the daughter of Donald CBS and for some reason, he keeps putting me in charge of everything.”

This post has been updated to include the responses from Kimmel and Colbert